Mr. Doggett's Suggested Summer Reading for Students

If you are a conservative, one of the things you become accustomed to
is Society's tacit assumption that liberals--even when disastrously and
predictably wrong--are well-intentioned, while conservatives--even when
demonstrably right--are motivated by selfishness, animus or simple crotchetiness.
Even those who should know better accept this general proposition, witness
George W. Bush's savvy but offensive campaign slogan "Compassionate Conservative"
or Winston Churchill's famous dictum: Any man who is not a liberal when
young has no heart, any man who is not a conservative when older has no
brain. This notion is particularly galling if you rooted for the
Chicago police at the 1968 Convention and for the Guardsmen at Kent State,
while aged 6 & 10 respectively. It is really frustrating that
this misconception prevails regardless of the evidence of human experience.
Thus, the American Communists and fellow-travelers of the '30s & '40s
are considered to be misguided do-gooders, but those who opposed them on
the Right are considered fascists. Like something out of Alice
in Wonderland, it is better in social circles to be Alger Hiss than
Whittaker Chambers.

But there's no use complaining about any of this, first because no one
cares, second because it is so deeply ingrained in the political psyche.
It is something that we simply learn to accept, sort of the way you learn
to accept that Blacks will continue to vote Democrat despite the fact that
Democrat policies have lead directly to the ghettoization or imprisonment
of a significant portion of the black populace. It does however lead
to some uncomfortable moments, especially when you are young. So
most conservatives have some Ur-text that has a particular meaning to them--that
first book (or magazine--for many it was National Review) that whispered:
"You are not alone. You are not abnormal." Edmund Burke's Reflections
on the Revolution in France (read Orrin's
review), Witness, Buckley's God and Man at Yale, Conscience
of a Conservative (read Orrin's
review), all of these books fit the bill for many, but for me, the
first great text was Radical Chic by Tom Wolfe.

Radical Chic, which famously chronicles a party hosted by Leonard
Bernstein and his wife to raise money for the Black Panthers, did something
unique, something which I don't believe had been done up until that time.
It's not a polemic; it doesn't come right out and say anything directly
negative about the Panthers or their white upper class supporters.
It does something much more insidious; it makes them appear ridiculous.
What a sublime moment that was, to have someone out there saying, not simply
that the other side was wrong, but that they were silly. Somehow
it made it alright that folks considered us troglodytes, after all, if
our views seemed harsh and uncaring at least we didn't look imbecilic.
Since then of course the floodgates have opened--much of Ronald Reagan's
appeal lay in his ability to make conservatives feel proud of their beliefs
and to poke gentle fun at the most ridiculous aspects of liberal dogma
and authors like PJ O'Rourke and Chris Buckley do a brilliant job of exposing
the profound idiocy at the heart of liberalism. The old dictum that
to a liberal life is a tragedy, to a conservative a comedy, is amply borne
out in the writing of these genuinely funny observers.

Had Tom Wolfe never written another word we would still be beholden
to him for blazing this trail. Lucky for us, this was simply the
first great salvo in a long career of puncturing the pretensions of the
Establishment Left, as evidenced by the second story in the book, Mau-Mauing
the Flak Catchers. Here he chronicles the exploitation of white
guilt by minority activist applying for government grant money in San Francisco.
He would go on to write several terrific conservative novels--Bonfire
of the Vanities and A Man in Full (read Orrin's
review)--and one great audio novella--Ambush at Fort Bragg (read
Orrin's
review)--but he may never have written anything better than Radical
Chic.